Data on drugs, dollars, & docs

One of the issues that Dan Ariely addressed in his book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, and in his 2009 blog, centered on the question of payments to doctors:

The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound the problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being influenced by the drug maker -- 'I can still be objective!' they’ll say -- but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwards.

Propublica launched Dollars for Docs. to publicize how much doctors are paid. At this point, its data encompasses more than $2 billion in payments that 15 major drug companies made to doctors in the period from 2009 for 2012.
Read more in Data on Drugs, Dollars & Doctors

OK, you got people's attention, but is it the kind you really want?

#marketing #stereotyping Well, if the goal was to get people talking, Samsung did succeed in that. But in the internet age we are learning that not all publicity is good publicity. BTW the vacuuming trick for the hair appeared in a video that showed how a dad made his daughter's pony tail.   It can do that, but it won't braid.

If you're longing for the good old days when bashing women was the way to go when using stereotyped marketing, just take a quick trip down memory lane with this collection of commercials.

                                         

For more on attention at all costs, see http://tomfishburne.com/2013/05/controversy-marketing.html

Winnowing the web

While advanced technology is what enables this kind of collaboration and capacity, Whaley’s model is decidedly low-tech: The printed page of the Talmud. In presentations to the Science Online Bay Area (SOBA) Innovations in Academic Publishing and Peer Review last fall, he showed how the Talmudic layout consists of the original text in the center surrounded by annotated commentary. This arrangement is paradigmatic "of a work where the dialog around the meaning and relevance of a passage creates the value for that passage in and of itself," Whalen said at the time.
read more in Winnowing the Web With Crowdsourced Annotation

The evolution of money

We've come a long way from coins to bills to checks to plastic to online payments and digital wallets. The question now is:

Is society ready for bitcoin? My answer in 2000 words (as specified by the assignment) is at  http://www.coindesk.com/is-society-ready-for-bitcoin/

Google contributes to the big data battle against human trafficking

When we think of slavery, we think of something that has been eradicated from modern civilization. But the fact remains that nearly 21 million people around the world are effectively enslaved.

Despite being illegal, human trafficking flourishes as a $32 billion industry that is abetted by sophisticated use of technology. The hope is that technology can also be used against the traffickers in the form of big data solutions. Read more in Fighting Human Trafficking With Big Data

Collaboration as a winning strategy

We're used to thinking of competition as the key to lower prices. But in certain cases, cooperation leads to more efficient use of resources. That was the case for an Ohio hospital alliance that realized substantial savings just a few months after pooling resources. Read more in 

Collaboration & the Supply Chain

Where to begin?

Usually, the answer is: "Begin at the beginning."  But where is that?

A while back, I started a discussion on LinkedIn about useless advice for writing. What topped my list was, "an essay has a beginning, a middle, and an end."  Writers may be told the same for novels, and it is really just as useless there because you don't necessarily start with what happened first in the story. In fact, classical works are famous for beginning in medias res. So, there is very good precedent for the beginning of a piece of writing not to lay out the framework to set the chronology.

The key thing is to begin in a way that draws the reader into wanting to continue reading the story, the essay, or the poem. And, yes, you should think of making it interesting even when your  reader is also your  teacher.

What doesn't work for openers? That question will get different answers. Today someone, no doubt thinking of Bulwer-Lytton  posted the warning not to open a novel with the weather. As some pointed out, though, there are novels that do it quite effectively. I would say that there are no set rules for opening novels, and that's a good thing. The perception that there are rules for opening essays, in my humble opinion, is what leads to very formulaic and boring openers, like the one I just read this morning. It started with "The Oxford dictionary defines... ." Now, that is the sort of thing I  expect students to rely on -- in high school. It's something they should get beyond in college. Certainly, it's not what I'd expect to find in a piece written by someone who gets paid for his work. It's true that you do sometimes want to use a formal definition to clarify how you use a particular term, but it's not exactly an attention-grabber.

Any thoughts on what you find does work well for openers?